March 2020 crash
The rapid fall in world markets at the start of the pandemic, during which liquidity vanished even in the safest instruments.
How to read the number
The unusual part was not that shares fell but that safe assets were sold alongside them: participants needed cash and sold whatever could still be sold.
When the metric lies
The quick recovery has been turned into a rule about how fast any crash is escaped, although the policy response was unprecedented in both scale and speed.
Also known as: covid crash